


A Merry Little Christmas

by greygerbil



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:15:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5471027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dominick and Rafael spend their Christmas Eve in the kitchen talking about the future and the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Merry Little Christmas

“You are aware we could _buy_ cookies?”

It was not an argument worthy of his position as an attorney, Rafael knew that, but he would have felt remiss if he had not at least tried to make it. A whole evening to himself was a rare luxury these days, especially when it coincided with Dominick’s time off. He would rather not spend Christmas Eve in the kitchen growing resentful over differences in flour measuring techniques.

“That’s not the same!” Dominick claimed, as expected.

Rafael sighed and took off his tie. No reason to dip the silk in dough. While he rolled up his sleeves, he considered the recipes that Dominick had spread out over the counter. The text was in Italian, written in a looping, old-fashioned hand. Mysterious drops of various shades of brown as well as transparent grease stains covered almost every inch of the papers. The fading blue ink was smudged where liquid had fallen on the words, and at least two other people had added their own comments to the text, one in English – Dominick’s writing –, one in Italian.

“Your grandmother’s?” Rafael guessed.

Dominick turned around to look at him, a crease between his eyebrows. “How did you know?”

“I can do detective work, too.”

One of the recipes was simply titled _Biscottini con Marmellata_ , another _Pignoli Amaretti_ followed by _Taralli al Vino_ with the word ‘white’ scribbled above the title.

“Can you read the recipes, too?”

Rafael scanned a few lines. “They’re not too complex.”

“You’ve gotten a lot better at Italian.”

“Knowing Spanish makes it easier.” Rafael raised a brow. “It’s all self-preservation instinct, anyway. I’ve noticed your relatives talk about me in front of me.”

From somewhere inside the fridge that he was rummaging through, Rafael heard Dominick laugh.

“They’ll still do that. They do it to me, too, in Italian _and_ in English. Ah, here it is!”

With a triumphant smile, he presented an unlabeled bottle of what Rafael presumed to be eggnog.

“We’re going to get festively drunk, I see,” he noted, as he began opening cupboards to collect ingredients. It occurred to him that they so rarely cooked together that he didn’t know anything about the organisation of Dominick’s kitchen – only that ‘organisation’ was too favourable a word for it. He just barely managed to stop a one kilo packet of sugar from knocking him out by pressing his flat hand against the objects in a cupboard that was all too happy to vomit its contents all over him the moment he opened the door.

“That’s what you do when you’ve got the Grinch in your kitchen,” Dominick said, filling two glasses to the brim. Rafael allowed himself a brief smile.

*

With his long-fingered hands, Dominick rolled the dough into thick snakes and cut off more or less equally-sized pieces. Rafael placed them one after the other between his palms. The soft blocks were transformed into balls that he set in evenly spaces rows on the baking tray, pushing them down with his knuckles and leaving a small dent in the middle for the marmalade. One of the cookies stood out over the rest. He carefully scraped off half an inch of dough and applied light pressure to make it conform.

Throwing his chunk of dough from one hand to the other like an overeager pizza baker, Dominick chuckled.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re all the _exact same size_ , Rafi.”

“You’re making me do this, so let me do it right,” Rafael argued. “If they are different sizes, they won’t be ready at the same time.”

“You won’t be able to make cookies like that once we have kids, you know. If the dough is on the baking tray at all, it’ll be a success,” Dominick joked.

“So I will continue to make cookies like this until the end of my life? Sounds good to me,” Rafael shot back.

“Yeah, right.” Dominick grinned, but his expression quickly turned to confusion. “But... you don’t really _never_ want to have kids, do you?”

Rafael lowered his next ball of dough. “I don’t think I’d be a very good father. Have you seen me with Noah? Or Bella’s child?”

“Oh, come on.” Dominick snorted and slapped the chunk back on the table. “You’re just skittish around kids because you don’t even try, so you’re not used to them.”

Sometimes, Dominick’s insights, off-handedly delivered as they may be, could be pretty poignant. It was true that Rafael usually rejected Noah before Olivia could even hand him over, while making a joke along the lines that giving him a toddler could in itself be considered child endangerment. When they were at Bella’s house, Dominick was so eager to fulfil his duties as an uncle that Rafael could get away with a bit of head-patting and a friendly smile at the baby. He didn’t think he’d held a child for longer than twenty seconds since Eddie’s boy had been born, and even then he’d spent the one time he’d been convinced to do so looking for opportunities to hand the baby back before it started crying.

“ _Maybe_ I would consider adopting one child,” he said, looking at the ball of dough. At some point in his mid-thirties, he had given up on the idea of children because it seemed unlikely that he would ever allot such a big commitment to his private life when all he ever did revolved around his work. Being with Dominick had already forced him to shift his balance a little. “When the child drags me to family therapy for all the things I will inevitably screw up, I can at least point to the fact that I chose a competent co-parent.” Because Dominick, without a doubt, would be a brilliant father.

Shaking his head, Dominick got up to check on the batch of _amaretti_ already in the oven. 

“Thanks,” he said, half-smiling. “I don’t get that at all, though. I want to have five kids, or six.”

Rafael just stared at him until Dominick took note.

“I loved growing up with siblings,” he defended himself.

“Five kids in a household with a lawyer and an attorney? That’s not gonna happen. You have to consider that your mother didn’t work.”

“Yeah, okay,” Dominick conceded. “But we gotta have more than one. I’ve always wanted a big family. Four?”

“Two. And you already have a big family.”

“Three.”

“No.”

Dominick stared into the fridge for a moment and Rafael could all but hear the wheels in his head turning. “What if we get selected for an adoption the second time, but they can only give us a set of twins?”

Rafael rolled his eyes.

“In that ludicrously specific circumstance, yes.”

Grinning, Dominick strode back to the table, a bounce in his step. “Okay, three, then.”

Suppressing another sigh, Rafael reached for his glass and emptied it. “I’m happy we’re discussing these life-changing decisions while I’m drunk and possibly about to fall into a sugar coma.” He licked his lips, frowning. “What brand is this?”

“That’s my uncle Gino’s homemade eggnog.” Dominick slid up next to him in the chair, marmalade in hand. “The first time he let me have a glass I was seven. I passed out under my cousin’s bed and my family looked for me for an hour.”

Still grinning, he began to dab marmalade on top of the _biscottini_.

Rafael dented the last cookie. “And just like that, your uncle Gino is not allowed anywhere near my hypothetical two-point-five children.”

*

“What are you doing?”

While Dominick sprinkled the _taralli_ with powdered sugar, Rafael had turned his attention to the cupboards again and now diligently pulled paper package after cardboard box after Tupperware case out of the depths of the kitchen furniture.

“I’m trying to establish a working layout.”

Not that his own kitchen was some sort of Stepford Wife’s dreamland, either, but at least his cupboards didn’t double as death traps and potential nesting grounds for exciting undiscovered species of roaches.

“I have my own order,” Dominick said, without much conviction.

“The complete victory of entropy is _not_ an organisational system.”

As Rafael stepped over to his side, he could see that Dominick was trying not to smile.

“It’s not that bad.”

“Is that so?” Rafael slapped a small plastic bowl down on the table. “People’s exhibit number one, a container of diced candied orange peels two years past their expiration date.”

Dominick snorted. He stood up, and, before he went to the sink to wash his white-coated hands, placed a brief kiss on Rafael’s lips.

“You’re gonna make someone a _great_ house-husband someday.”

“Keep it up and it’s not going to be you,” Rafael said, smile acidic.

*

“Didn’t you ever make Christmas cookies when you were a kid?”

There were two baking parchment squares of raw cookies still waiting on the kitchen table, but they were done cleaning up and now just babysat the oven. With Dominick’s phone as a timer next to them, they lounged on the couch in the living room with the rest of uncle Gino’s eggnog. The sweet, heavy scent of the products of _nonna’s_ recipes, from a yesteryear that was still untouched by beach-body-obsession and related ingredient inhibitions, wafted through the apartment. An old sci-fi movie was playing, with actors in ridiculous costumes running across a barely concealed sound stage – Dominick’s choice, of course.

“My mother doesn’t like baking, but I did help my _abuelita_. She’s... she was a very good cook.”

Last time this December, his mother and him had been busy preparing her funeral. Rafael picked up his glass to take a long sip.

“Sorry,” Dominick said.

Rafael looked up. Big blue eyes full of compassion stared back at him. Dominick was the closest the human race would ever come to approximating a shepherd dog. Rafael squeezed his hand.

“It’s alright,” he said, attempting to veer the topic back towards something less depressing. “You and your family did this a lot?”

“We still do. That’s why I drove out last weekend. Between all of us, we made like literally a thousand cookies.” 

“If your family already made cookies, why did we make any?” Rafael frowned. “Who’s going to eat all this?”

“Don’t worry, I have enough relatives.” Dominick halted, shifted, stretching his long legs and feigning a sudden intense interest in the alien dressed in what looked like a rejected bear suit. He picked up his thread again a few moments later: “‘sides, I thought – I mean, we’ve been together for almost a year now. We’re kind of – a family of our own, too, right?”

Maybe his brain had frozen in the punishingly low pre-Christmas temperatures, but it only then really clicked in Rafael’s head that what to him was a cheesy attempt at creating holiday flair by going through the expected motions was to Dominick one of the things that honestly meant togetherness. He was trying to establish traditions; no wonder kids had come up in the conversation.

Rafael stared down at the milky-yellow eggnog, briefly silent. People said Dominick was oblivious at times, and he was, but Rafael could put his foot in it just as well.

“Of course,” he said, hoping it would make up for his prior resistance. “And it’s much fairer if we have our own batch of slightly singed cookies that we can force everyone else to eat in the name of the Christmas spirit.”

Nodding his head, Dominick wrapped his arm around Rafael’s shoulders and when he leaned in, his hair smelled like almond cookies.

“Your Uncle Gino-story reminded me of one of my own Christmas Eves,” Rafael said, now determined to add something but sneering and griping to this evening – though Dominick seemed more or less fine with that brand of humour, or he’d probably have broken up ten months ago. Still, it was almost Christmas, after all. “I got lost once as well.”

“Yeah?”

“I must have been... six or seven? I was playing with two friends of mine on the stairwell. It was late and someone had left the door to the roof open. I was convinced we would be able to see Santa deliver his presents from up there.”

Dominick made the sort of noise you’d grant a baby bunny. Rafael glowered briefly and reminded himself of his peace-making intentions.

“Anyway, while we stood up there in the snow without jackets, we didn’t watch the door, and of course it fell shut behind us. You needed a key to open it – probably so silly children wouldn’t wander up there unsupervised.”

“Oh, shit. What did you do?”

“Not much.” He shrugged. “I don’t think we realised that it could be dangerous. We played until we got too cold, then Alex decided that it would be a good idea to climb down the side of the seven-story building. Of course that seemed like a logical plan to Eddie and me. Thankfully a neighbour heard us before we’d decided how we would best scale down to the uppermost window, but I remember I was already sitting on the railing when she unlocked the door. That’s the story of how my friends and me almost died a very stupid death on Christmas Eve.”

“Thank God for that neighbour.” Dominick chuckled, thumb brushing against Rafael’s cheek. His smile outshone the haphazardly hung chain of lights in his window. It made Rafael’s heart feel a little lighter to see him still in such a good mood, but then, Dominick so rarely was cross with him. As he leaned against his side, he wondered idly what Dominick was doing with a bitter cynic like him.

“Hey, about all the stuff we talked about,” Dominick said carefully, after a while. “I mean, we should really think about it. When we’re sober. I want you to know, though, if something like this can be our Christmas Eve for the next fifty years, I’m fine with that, too.”

Rafael couldn’t respond earnestly because he was afraid his voice might betray how deep Dominick’s comment had reached into his core, so he grasped his hand again. “And you’re the only man on earth for whom I’d consider spending Christmas Eve washing icing out of the hair of a few snot-nosed children of my own.”

Dominick laughed and elbowed Rafael’s side.

“You’re such a romantic.”

Rafael smirked. He tugged Dominick towards himself by the lapels of his shirt.

“I’m supposed to take that criticism from the man who thinks that Dean Martin’s _That’s Amore_ is ‘a really cute lovesong’? Okay.”

In the end, they really did have one tray of slightly singed cookies because when the timer sounded, they were otherwise occupied.


End file.
